Integrating a Third-party Email Solution

Pardot can track and convert prospects that come to your website from emails you send via a third-party system. You can append a tracking parameter to the end of the URLs in your email that identify the clicking recipient to Pardot. If the prospect clicks on one of the tracked links, they will have a new prospect record created in Pardot if there is not already an existing one with the same email, and you will see their Third-party Email click and page views in their activities.

respectively, as their email addresses are dynamically inserted into the URL.

Note that in the example above, [email] represented the email marketing solution’s mail merge value for email address. It could very well be something like %%email_address%% or {email}. Check your email solution’s documentation to be certain.

Notes:

The link you are appending with the tracking parameter must point to a page on your site that includes the Pardot Javascript tracking code.

Due to the way Pardot generates a unique unsubscribe link for each prospect when emails are sent using Pardot, you cannot use your default Pardot unsubscribe link with third-party email solutions.

You can add this tracking parameter to Pardot custom redirects to have enhanced reporting in Pardot. This method gives you a macro view of all prospects who clicked the link vs. the micro view of drilling into each prospect record to view the link click activity. Please note that the bit.ly versions of Pardot custom redirects do not support this parameter and do not track the clicks correctly.